


untitled

by applegnat



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Christmas, Italy, M/M, Rome - Freeform, opera - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-18
Updated: 2007-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:39:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's played tourist before. He's spent time - a lot of time - on these streets. They were here on a warm July night, after all, for hours and hours, inching down a road that seemed packed with all of Italy, and he was kind of breathless then, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	untitled

**Author's Note:**

> Gila and Sandro. This was supposed to contain opera, a grandmother, and a red silk scarf, per the specs of one 22by7. The moony-eyed yearning and near-constant presence of junk food were my own scurrilous additions. Written early November of 2006 and unposted because I couldn't believe I had, fo' shizzle, slashed Alberto Gilardino and Alessandro Nesta.
> 
> A couple of things to keep in mind: this fic is already kind of outdated - a measure of how fast things move in football. Had I posted this a month ago, it would not only have been appropriate for the season, but you would also know exactly what I was talking about because little Gila was in the midst of a long and terrifying goal drought. And although Sandro eventually declared himself for Milan, between September and November everyone expected him to move back to his old club, Lazio (which, it turned out, couldn't afford him. Heh.

"What could be more difficult than playing football for AC Milan?" Gila wonders aloud.

"Playing for the women's team in Afghanistan," Sandro says, dunking a fry into tomato sauce. "Playing for a team in south Lebanon. Scoring an own goal in Colombia." He eats neatly, slowly, one of those enviable people whose relationship to food is a benevolent, incidental, fancy-meeting-you-here thing. "What could be easier than playing football for AC Milan?"

"Playing for Lazio, maybe," Gila offers, and Sandro shoots him a look, a real killer, over his decorous mouthful of junk food. Gila apologises and lets himself be called a fucking bastard in good humour, because Sandro sometimes takes jokes very well and sometimes misses the point completely, and Gila finds it difficult to distinguish between the two, which doesn't matter, because two years after he should have gotten over it, he's still crazy about Sandro.

It's utterly lame, yes. But after years of struggling and failing to live up to the demands of football divinity - which in increasingly rare states of level-headed self-awareness he knows is a bunch of rubbish - he's given up on achieving perpetual cool. He's twenty-four and the dorkishness is, he's confident, here to continue developing with the rest of his personality. People have been known to grow out of it, sure, but people - coughTonicough - haven't, either. And he doesn't know why he's thinking about this, why this even matters, when he should be thinking about football, for fuck's sake, scoring a damn goal and then doing it again and again until he can wipe out the last eight months or so, starting right now, even if it is Christmas break and he's in Rome, at a teammate's grandmother's house. Which tests off the dork scale. Except, get this, it's actually _Sandro's_ grandmother's home.

There is, unsurprisingly, a surfeit of breakable things about him. It's a pretty place, very fussy and ladylike, small in spite of its high ceilings and spotless white walls, posh accents all about this part of town - not, incidentally, the Nesta part of town. (Sandro's grandmother has already made about six barbed comments about her daughter living in rail-employee quarters.) Very much a place where spotless, pristine things can exist unlet and unhindered. Very unlike a typical Gilardino domicile. He can't take out a football here; he's pretty sure he'd knock something over, and it would all end with getting shot in the kneecaps. Sandro's grandmother delighted in telling him about her exciting girlhood years over dinner last night, complicit in the shenanigans of underage members of the Resistance and firing rounds from the revolvers of the young guns of the late great Communist party.

"You're boring him," Sandro said to her.

"Nonsense," she said, "he's such an intelligent boy."

Cheered by the apparent non-sequitur, Sandro looked up and grinned a terribly fond grin, reinforcing a family intimacy. Gila smiled too, relieved at not having to say anything at all.

He's pretty sure he's crazy about Sandro's grandmother, too, by this point. He ran into them quite by accident, after a sequence of events that involved a stubborn and wrenching refusal to join his parents at their church retreat in Verona, a Nike photoshoot and a quarrel with Alice. It was too cold to be out imbibing culture, but somewhere in the vicinity of San Lorenzo he'd stopped his car to listen to German tourists sing the _Messiah_ \- only in Rome - and took a psychological blow to his windpipe as Sandro manifested out of the cold air and the starry music, wondering a little too enthusiastically about what Gila was doing here. Gila thought he spotted a gaggle of enthusiastic tourists looking around for a suspected football superstar across the street, although a beanie and a pair of glasses took care of most of the famous face and the girly hair.

"That cap is ridiculous," Gila said, and then said, "I had a fight with Alice."

"Do you have a suit on you?" Sandro asked. "I'm taking my grandmother to the opera tonight."

And this is more evidence of the soul-deep lameness of Alberto - he understands little more than the language of the opera, but he actually doesn't mind it. It's much like Dante in that sense, although he had to study Dante in school and failed miserably (because of football, at which he's also - oh God, no). He can get at the opera, though; or at least let the opera get at him, more easily than something so dense and exalted has any right to do.

So. "I have a suit," he confessed.

The first thing Sandro's grandmother said as they approached her in the glittering foyer of the Teatro (Gila had felt before the force of the attention of people carefully not looking at him, but this lot took the snooty avoidance to an unprecedented level) was, "My dears, isn't this funny? You come all the way from Milan to see the opera in this hovel."

"This is my grandmother," said Sandro, un-beanied and un-shaded, decently taking full responsibility for his looks now. "Nonna, you know who this is."

"Of course," she said and winked. "You're this Shevchenko I keep hearing so much about."

It turns out that Sandro's grandmother finds football funny.

*

"Hey," says Gila, in a moment of gritty courage inspired by a break in the cop show marathon the local cable channel is running and he, for reasons best known to Sandro, has been watching for the last couple of hours, sprawled on a couch of striped silk and decadent comfort, "thanks for having me over."

"Don't be stupid," Sandro says, not taking his eyes off the detergent commercial. Destroy the evidence, wash the blood right out of your clothes. Sandro says 'don't be stupid' a lot. Gila's heard him use it every which way - in anger, affection, an invitation to open up, a warning to back off.

"No, seriously," he says. "It means a lot."

Sandro looks up, pretends to throw something at him. Gila flinches, tricked as always.

"No, seriously," Sandro says, and in that moment Gila thinks that this man has always been his friend, "don't be stupid."

They could hug now, except they tend to be at opposite ends of the field when embrace-worthy occasions arise. They could talk more, but conversation has never really been the cornerstone of their friendship. Friendship has never really been the cornerstone of their friendship. For Gila it started out as a, 'oh my god, you're Alessandro Nesta and somehow I'm wearing the same jersey as you and get to train with you and when we practice one-on-one you frustrate me all the time, except when I manage to beat you, and then you're interested in me, even though you come off as a bit of a bad loser, but I don't take anything you say or do personally because we're both adults and I'm the new kid and until recent memory serves you were way out of my league and also, _Alessandro Nesta_,' thing, and developed from there.

Professional football is too intense for fake intimacy, and Gila learns to appreciate the feeling in stray words and touches, earnest advice and raucous celebrations and moments of stark, revelatory defeat, because the fact that it's so fleeting doesn't make it any less real around here. It makes him feel stupid, sometimes, looking around him at people with different priorities and one foot always out of the door. He really gets what Domenico meant - the idiot - when he said you needed to be a bastard around a big club like Milan, and sometimes - okay, a lot of the time - he wishes he was unaffected and unshaken by how much this means to him. Really untouchable. Like, Sandro-untouchable. Oh, shit, Gilardino, shut up, maybe you would be, if you _scored more_.

Sandro's toe prods him in the navel. "Stop."

"Okay," says Gila. "Stop what?"

Sandro shrugs; the programme starts up again. "Just stop."

 

The new episode has a dead prostitute in it.

"Oh my goodness," Gila hears himself say. "Not another one." The opera last night put on _La Traviata_. Sandro's grandmother, having been cultured and tasteful for long enough to have adored Maria Callas - Maria Callas in the flesh - remarked with some force on the inferiority of the new performances and the postmodern disregard for the prima donna, but was in tears by the end of it, anyway.

"Of course I've seen it all so many times before," she confided later, taking his arm in the foyer. "I don't even know how I feel anymore. There's just a memory, really, of how to feel. You must think me so silly."

"I wish I had a handkerchief to offer you," Gila muttered in dreadful earnest.

It made him feel strange and all pulled apart inside himself. Not that the story wasn't ridiculous, but he wasn't twelve anymore (although he did play a lot better football then, breatheinbreatheout). There was the music, and in it something intangible, like rightness of knowing exactly where the goal was, that made him raw.

Sandro was quiet and distant as they drew away from the hall, letting his grandmother link her free arm in his, so that they were doing a six-legged cancerian navigation of the corridors of the theatre, not really sure of where they were going. Then he stumbled, seemed to wake up, and pulled away gently.

He looks at Gila suspiciously, now. "I thought you liked the show last night?"

"I did. But not - not for the _story_, come on," Gila says, and thinks everything through again. "I mean, you have to agree. It's like a different crazy universe."

"It could happen," Sandro mutters.

Gila blinks.

"I really hope you're saying that for the sake of argument," he ventures.

Sandro cocks an eyebrow, the way he does when he's either absolutely serious or pretending to be absolutely serious. "Look, when you don't have convenient means of communication," he begins.

"Oh my god, shut up," says Gila, beginning to realise, for the first time since last evening, that he really does enjoy being a complete sucker for this man.

Sandro's grandmother enters the room just as the prostitute (alive, in flashback) begins to grope her underaged girlfriend in a dark alley. Gila coughs, because this is more graceful than turning up large innocent eyes to an aged person and confessing that this is, indeed, a lesbian make-out scene that he is watching with his feet up on her exquisite upholstery, toes touching her grandson's own exquisite feet.

"I think I've seen this before," Sandro's grandmother says, peering at the screen. "Isn't this the one where the little girl kills her out of jealousy?"

"I knew that was it," Sandro says. "Didn't I say that was going to be it?"

"Um," says Gila.

"Alberto's a gay icon, Nonna," Sandro informs her as he changes the channel. "He got interviewed about it and everything."

"That's nice, dear," she smiles. "I'll ask Lina to get you boys some popcorn, shall I?"

"No butter," says Sandro. "Anyway, ask Alberto about his gay iconness."

"...the hell?" Gila sputters.

"Oh, do tell me all about it," says his grandmother. "I've always been very open about these things with my children."

"Wha. No. I mean!" says Gila, rather more comfortable with grandparents who don't follow up offers of food with talk of sexual deviance. "It's not like. I have a girlfriend."

"Of course," she pats his hand, breezily. "One would never suppose it of _you_."

"I was just being polite," he says. "I mean, they asked. You can't disrespect these things."

"So you don't really believe all that stuff about professional maturity and being ready to accept these _things_?" Sandro asks, slyly.

Gila sighs, owns up.

"I guess I do," he says.

Sandro peers at a National Geographic program about - flamingoes? -for a couple of seconds, then resumes surfing.

Gila says, "It's not impossible for it to happen. Everyone's a professional at a certain level." He says, "At worst it means some things might have to change. Around the locker room, maybe. You know, if people are uncomfortable. All I meant was, I'm okay with that. In the larger scheme of things. And I'm babbling. You should stop me."

"I've always wondered at this dressing room running around, myself," Nonna says. "You don't see girls get all excited about changing together. I think you make absolute sense, young man."

"I'm ... glad you think so?" Gila says.

"Why, it's positively a barometer of social progress!" she beams. "Don't you think so, Alessandro?"

Lina, who has, Gila guesses, been bonded labour in the household for apparently about four decades, arrives in just then to replenish their bowls of holiday victuals.

"Of course I do," says Sandro. He stops at a re-run of an old match. It's October's Madrid-Barca game.

"Oh look," Nonna says. "It's that Gianluca Zambrotta. He's such a hottie."

"Ew, Nonna," says Sandro. "He's younger than me, even."

"No wonder you all like to run around him in the shower."

"Popcorn?" Gila offers.

*

At night, Sandro seems to want to play host. His idea of hospitality is to go out driving after dinner, round and round the streets of Rome. He drives them southwards, down the autostrada to Cinecittá. It figures that he's an utterly reckless driver who makes Gila's breath catch in his throat.

He's played tourist before. He's spent time - a lot of time - on these streets. They were here on a warm July night, after all, for hours and hours, inching down a road that seemed packed with all of Italy, and he was kind of breathless then, too. He wonders aloud if Sandro's taking him to meet his parents, a thought that makes Sandro snort. There's a virtual ragbag of clothes thrown over him: tatty denim jacket over an old white sweater over a Chicago Bulls vest - although, Gila knows, he doesn't like basketball - over jeans stained with popcorn-salt and ketchup. The dull red of an incongruous silk scarf gleams at his throat, in the light of the packed snow and loamy street lamps. He is haggard and bundled up and as desirable as Gila has ever seen him.

"Have you seen Rome?" Sandro asks him. "Have you really _seen_ it?"

"I get the feeling you're asking a rhetorical question," Gila says. "But ... yes? I have? Many, many times?"

Sandro exhales. "It is here," he declares. "This is it."

Gila says nothing.

"Look around you," Sandro says, loud, exhilarated. "Isn't it _super_? Isn't it great?"

"Hey," Gila tries to joke. "Your big city snootiness isn't my thing, you know. All cities are really great for us small-towners."

"But don't you feel like this when you go back home?"

Gila shrugs.

"I like it," he says. "It means something. And I know people over there. But it really isn't the same thing for us. We always know there's something big, beyond us. Some place to go gawk at and wish you lived in, maybe. Whereas for you, I think. I don't know. Maybe you just end up going everywhere and thinking it's not as good as where you come from."

"Of course it isn't," Sandro says. "Nothing's as good as Rome."

"I-"

"What could be worth this," Sandro exhales.

The short pause is pure winter, puff and crackle.

"If it means that much," says Gila, and Sandro drums his gloved fingers on the steering wheel.

"It means everything," he says, and sighs. "But it doesn't mean anything."

"Hm."

"What's the point?" he continues, almost to himself. "What's the point of all this sentiment?"

Gila feels a little timid, touching Sandro's shoulder. "I don't understand," he says, honestly. "But why is it so difficult to do what makes you happy?"

Sandro looks at him, then throws his head back and laughs.

"Coming from you, that's a bit rich," he says, smiling.

"Don't even," says Gila, as the car purrs back to life. "Don't even go there."

"I will," says Sandro, and he drives so fast that Gila puts his head in his hands. "Because you're a dickhead. And I'm a bore."

"Sandro?"

"Alberto."

"Don't be stupid."

"Coming from you, pretty _fucking_ rich."

"No, I mean it. You should stop driving like a maniac."

"You big girl," Sandro says. "Can't stand fast cars, can't score a goal - whatever will Milan do with you, kid?" He does slow down, barely perceptibly. "They'll have me hang around to haul your ass out of trouble, won't they? Keep you in shape and all that."

"Of course," says Gila, stung, "because goals haven't been a problem at your end of the pitch, not exactly."

Sandro's indignant counter-snipes lasts all the way back to the house, and Gila feels ridiculous, rejuvenated by the time they step out of the car, because it is out, in the open, just like that. There's nothing like hearing someone admit you're crap to take the weight off your shoulders, shoulders that Sandro slings a casual arm about, woollen knuckles brushing the bare skin of Gila's jaw.

"You need a shave," Sandro says, fumbling the key in the vicinity of the front door lock.

_Yes_, thinks Gila, too distracted to talk, _I do_, and does a little fumbling of his own, pulling his mobile phone out of his pocket to shine a light down on the bolt. _I do need a shave_. The kiss is raspy, cold, smelling of fog and aftershave, one foot in the door as they crowd each other in the hallway. He thinks, _don't leave_, but doesn't say it, because it's not the point; it's not the point that Gila wants to collect precious things, find and keep them the way Sandro's grandmother keeps her crystal and jewels in this funny, claustrophobic little house. It's not the point that there are two people involved in this, it's that one of them is - _is_, and he aches at the brush of skin, at the sudden absence of yearning.

_You're_, Sandro breathes, _you're so, you're a, you're my, you are_. Gila watches him in the darkness, later. He makes out the outline of him asleep, fingers uncurled and relaxed in Gila's hair, in a way that makes him afraid to close his eyes, because he knows what its like to wake up in the mornings and freak out at what the world is about to throw at you, and also because he thinks he should be making the most of things while he can, and also because there is just too much thinking going on here and between being unable to shut off his brain and unable to close his eyes it is kind of hard to approach the impending morning anyway but consciously.

"Hey."

Gila starts, and if he thought his heart was beating loudly before, he misses the relative silence now.

"What?" he rasps, afraid that any movement, any change in tone will render things a little more irreparable.

"Can you get to fucking sleep?" Sandro's voice is resonant with the hyperattentiveness that comes with being only half-awake. He turns over, hair falling into his eyes, and his arm is heavy, trapping Gila.

"I'll wake you in the morning," he says, asleep before he quite finishes.

Gila thinks he'll try, since Sandro asked.


End file.
